Mobility!

Owen has been right on the verge of crawling since early September when we were visiting Grandpa, Grandma and Aunt Heather in Winnipeg. He had the arm part but not the legs, or the legs and not the arms, or he'd forget to pick his belly up off the floor.

It has frustrated him to no end that he can't just go.

By last week, he was managing to scrabble and roll his way around, covering a lot of ground, but without much sense of direction.

Then on Wednesday night, on the carpet upstairs and in his birthday suit, he crawled!

He was enjoying some naked bum time. I turned on the tap to start running his bath and Owen got excited and just crawled down the hall toward the bathroom. That was a special treat on a day Daddy's brain was completely fried from all things H1N1.

It's still a little laboured, but he's pretty pleased with his new skill. If he's on the floor and you take your eye off him, there's no telling where he'll be when you look back.

Owen also went to a Hallowe'en party this week with some of his wee friends. He was Max from Where the Wild Things Are. I can't get over how cute he looked:

Maybe, Owen's enthusiasm for crawling is also contributing to his new napping ability. It used to be he would rarely nap for much more than half an hour. It seemed he didn't want to miss anything in the run of a day. This week he's had some relative marathons, including one of nearly three hours. A blessing for Rhia as I've been putting in some long hours at work this week.

On that note, I think I've run out of steam this Friday night.

Ageless Beauty

Last night we took Petey* to his first rock show. We saw Stars at the Marquee. It had been a pretty social weekend, with two Halloween parties on Friday and a Wardroom birthday party at King's earlier that evening.

So being slightly partied out and, hey, pregnant, we hung out way in the back at a table.

We wondered what Petey might think of it all--how did those gut-rumbling bass notes sound and feel in his little pool? He has functioning ears, according to the various sites and books we've been reading.
We didn't get any definitive reaction from Petey. We had a good night though, even if we were out past our bedtimes for the second straight night. The band seemed to hit all our favourite songs from each album including Ageless Beauty right near the middle of the set.
At this stage I sometimes jokingly think of Petey as being, say, -6 months old. But maybe Petey's just ageless, and certainly beautiful.

That's us in our costumes up there. I was an octopus and Rhia the deep ocean. This particular pic (by Jen Laurette) doesn't show them off very well, but I think we look pretty darn good.



*A note on terminology: "Petey" is a long-running in-joke in our household. A name for the goat, budgie, platypus, etc. we have in an imaginary menagerie. (Don't let Rhia know I told you this, but it's after Peter Mansbridge, her newsman crush.) So, it's kind of like the Warner Brothers' monster (a la Steinbeck) who says, "I will hug him and squeeze him and call him George." In thes early weeks of pregnancy, whatever's swimming around in there has seemed pretty imaginary, so it's become Petey too. We often refer to Petey as a "he" but that doesn't mean anything. We don't know and we have no preference. Just shorthand.